The Argonautica: Chasing the Golden Fleece

In the third century BC, a scholar-poet named Apollonius of Rhodes sat down to do something almost impossible: rewrite Homer for an audience that had grown tired of Homer. The result was the Argonautica, the only Hellenistic epic that survives to us complete, and it tells a story every reader of his day already knew by heart — the voyage of Jason and his crew to fetch the Golden Fleece from the far edge of the world.

The fleece itself carried its own tragedy. In Thessaly, King Athamas had two children, Phrixos and Helle, by the goddess Nephele, but he cast her aside to marry Ino, who then plotted to have Phrixos sacrificed by rigging a false prophecy about a grain blight. As Phrixos was led to the altar, Nephele sent a ram with golden wool to rescue her children, carrying them through the sky. Helle fell into the strait now named Hellespont after her; Phrixos alone reached Colchis, where King Aeetes welcomed him. Phrixos sacrificed the ram to Zeus and gave its fleece to Aeetes, who hung it on an oak guarded by a serpent-like beast.

Back in Iolkos, Thessaly, a succession quarrel simmered. King Cretheus's son Aeson was the rightful heir, but his half-brother Pelias seized the throne, claiming descent from Poseidon. Warned by oracles that a man of royal blood would kill him, Pelias did not dare kill Aeson outright — he simply imprisoned him and his wife. When their son was born, Pelias ordered the infant killed, but Aeson secretly smuggled the baby to the centaur Chiron, who raised him on Mount Pelion. It was Chiron who gave the boy the name Jason.

A second prophecy warned Pelias that he would be slain by a stranger who entered the city wearing only one sandal. Years later, Jason, traveling from Chiron's cave toward Iolkos, lost a sandal crossing a swift river — in some versions while carrying an old woman, later revealed as Hera, across the water. He walked into the city exactly as foretold.

At a sacrificial feast, Pelias spotted the one-sandaled youth and remembered the prophecy. Rather than kill him outright, he devised a subtler trap: he would send Jason on a voyage almost impossible to survive, to Colchis, to retrieve the Golden Fleece. Pelias promised a magnificent ship and a crew of the region's finest young men. The shipbuilder Argos, aided by the goddess Athena, built a fifty-oared vessel named Argo, and the volunteers who joined it became known as the Argonauts — among them Castor and Polydeuces, Peleus (father of the future hero Achilles), the winged brothers Calais and Zetes, and Heracles himself.